Why Direct Instruction Remains Relevant Today

Direct Instruction—note the capital D and I—is the OG of explicit teaching.

Back in the mid-1960s, folks at the University of Illinois and later at Oregon arrived at a simple but essential insight: better teaching leads to better learning. As Siegfried Engelmann liked to point out, if students didn’t learn it, the teaching didn’t happen. Building on this premise, they began to formalize the components of effective explicit teaching — unambiguous modeling, brisk pacing, positive reinforcement, and the deliberate, systematic removal of scaffolds.

But they ran into a challenge early on: no one—not you, not me—could execute these moves precisely every time. Even with extensive training and intense coaching, teachers would improvise confusing examples, offer too few practice opportunities, or explain ideas in ways that created misconceptions. Sometimes the errors were small, but small things accumulate. Other times they were big, requiring teachers to spend huge amounts of time unteaching what had been taught poorly in the first place. For the early DI pioneers, it was crucial that instruction work for all kids—not just the ones who found learning easy.

So the DI team created full curriculum programs that helped teachers deliver explicit instruction with precise examples, child-friendly definitions, and carefully sequenced content. Early versions were developed for Project Follow Through and later evolved into programs like Reading Mastery and Corrective Reading. They were extremely effective. Today, the National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI) trains teachers to implement these programs with fidelity, and a vibrant community of Direct Instruction practitioners gathers each year for the National DI Conference in Eugene, Oregon.

👉 Join the best conference of the year in Eugene—this year featuring Carl Hendrick.

After Project Follow Through, another research paradigm emerged: The Process-Product research. This research focused on what effective teachers do—their behaviors—rather than on complete instructional systems like those evaluated in Project Follow Through. Interestingly, these studies supported the design of Direct Instruction: systematic scaffolding, interactive modeling, questioning, and feedback characterized the most effective teachers. Researchers called this pattern “active teaching” or “direct instruction” (lowercase di). It didn’t develop in isolation—many of these researchers, most famously Barak Rosenshine, knew and corresponded with the DI pioneers. It was exciting to see such strong convergence between the theory-driven design of DI and the correlational findings of the The Process-Product research.

More recently, explicit instruction and explicit teaching have become the common labels. These terms correspond to “lowercase di” – generic practices that anyone can adopt, regardless of program. Another research tradition, this time from educational psychology, confirmed the effectiveness of these methods through randomized controlled trials. Yet without an integrated, meticulously engineered curriculum, major barriers remain. A teacher might intend to “Model in Small Steps,” but without expert content analysis and field-tested examples, the stepwise progression may not be sufficiently incremental. They can aim to “Provide Independent Practice,” but the items chosen may not reveal the essential relationships between problems, and the practice may lack the necessary dosage, spacing, and cumulative review.

“Capital DI” Direct Instruction was doing explicit teaching long before explicit teaching had a name—and with a level of instructional design sophistication that generic versions still haven’t matched. The ultimate instructional system, in my view, is one that fully integrates the design of content with the delivery of instruction—the whole puppy, working as a single, coherent engine for learning.

That’s the core insight of Direct Instruction, and why it remains as relevant today as ever.